Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

“Has your life been a happy one?” Rutledge asked her.

Shock spread across her face, then lingered in her eyes. “No one ever asked me that before,” she said quietly. “But no. I was never given the choice of happiness. Only of service. I don’t know that I wasn’t better off, come to that. If you feel happiness, you must also feel grief.”

“Did Olivia Marlowe know grief?”

“Miss Livia? She went to funerals like the rest of them, and cried.”

“No. Grief for what her life brought her. Not the paralysis. Not the poetry. Not the dead in her family. But grief for what she was.”

“Aye,” the old woman answered finally. “She carried a great burden on her soul. And had no way to put it right. She said to me once, a long time ago, that God had put an affliction upon her, and I asked what that was. She told me, to live with evil and not know how to stop it.”

“And did she, by dying, put an end to it?”

Sadie frowned. “I don’t know, sir. For her sake, I pray she did. I’d hate to think of her lying in her grave with no hope of peace!”

He turned to go. Then thought of one final question. “Was she the frail angel that watched at Richard’s grave?”

But Sadie didn’t know what he was talking about. “She were crippled, aye, but never frail. And I’d not call her an angel. She had feelings, like any other woman!”

Wet and tired and thoroughly depressed, Rutledge tramped back to the inn and went through to the bar. But time had already been called, and he went instead to his room, where Hamish clamored so insistently in his mind that he couldn’t concentrate on the volumes of poetry that rested on the stand by his bed. After a time he put them down again, feeling as if he’d been prying.

Rachel came to the inn for her dinner that night, and he thought it was on purpose, to discover what he’d been up to. For reasons of his own, he was very happy to see her walk through the door.

“I hear that Tom Chambers came to call on you today,” she said when he’d asked her to join him at his table.

“I’m surprised that gossip hasn’t also told you what we discussed.”

She grinned, some of the strain slipping out of her face. “The truth is, Mr. Trask’s hearing is failing.”

He laughed outright.

Tilting her head, she said, “You’re younger when you laugh. I’ve often wondered what Peter would have been like, if he’d survived his war out in Africa. Stephen seemed to take France in stride-in fact he was quite the daredevil. Not that he told us, mind you! But somehow it was as if-as if it was only just another game he was very good at. When his foot went bad and they sent him home barely a month before the Armistice, I expected to find him cheering up half the hospital with his wild spirits. Instead he was desperately depressed. As if he wouldn’t have minded dying, but he minded terribly losing his foot. It was the oddest thing.”

He knew, but didn’t tell her, that often the men who taunted death had a terrible fear of it. And reached out to it in bravery because that was easier than waiting for it to come and fetch them, cowering in some corner. He knew-he’d taken his own wild risks, hoping to put an end to suffering he didn’t know how to face.

When he didn’t answer, she added, “But it was Thomas Chambers I came to torment you about, wasn’t it?”

‘‘Short of fiercely twisting my arm, alarming Mr. Trask, not to mention giving the gossips an earful before morning, how do you propose to do that?” He fell back on teasing her while he considered what he wanted to say to her.

“You don’t want to talk about it?” She was disappointed.

“There is little to tell, if you want the truth,” he said mildly. “He wanted to know what in blazes I was doing here on his turf-sounded much like Cormac FitzHugh and Dr. Hawkins in that regard-and agreed that if Stephen inherited Olivia’s papers, he-Chambers-has no idea what’s become of them. And Susannah would be the most likely person to have charge of them now, once they are found.”

Rachel considered that. “I wonder what she’ll do with them?”

“They have great intrinsic value. I don’t know their monetary worth, on the auction block. Oxford would be delighted to have them. Or Cambridge. She was a major poet.”

“But a woman. I wonder if she’ll be valued so highly, now that everyone knows who O. A. Manning really is. The war poems, for one thing-they seemed so, I don’t know, so genuine, a part of personal experience. But she never went to France, she was a woman who wore a brace on her leg and hardly ever left Cornwall, much less came face to face with war.”

“Does she have to shoulder a rifle and kill to understand war?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel answered honestly. “I wasn’t in France either. I can appreciate the words on the page, but I wasn’t there.”

“You sent a husband off to war. Nicholas went to France. Stephen. You loved all three of them. What did you feel?”

He knew how Jean had felt-she had wanted him back without four years of suffering and guilt and pain coming between them. Unchanged, nothing to remind her that he’d ever gone away from her. The man he was now terrified her. The man he had been was lost somewhere still in France.

She hesitated. “Fear, mainly. I was so afraid. The war dragged on, it seemed as if it would never end. And you tell yourself, ‘He can make it a few more days, another month, he can last out this year, there’s so little of it left!’ But you know, deep down inside, that he can’t live forever, that simple arithmetic, the number of shots fired, the number of shells that fall, the number of assaults and snipers-they have to find their targets, sometimes. And it’s really a matter of chance-the hazards of war-” She broke off and spread her napkin across her lap, taking pains with it so that he couldn’t see her face. He wondered whether she was speaking mostly about Peter or Nicholas. And told himself that he was being unfair to judge her for Peter’s sake.

Then she said in a different voice, “That’s all that you had to say to Mr. Chambers? Or he to you?”

“What were you expecting him to tell me? That he’d been waiting for me or someone like me, to come down here and open Pandora’s Box?”

“No,” she said, wistfulness in her face. “I don’t know what I expected. Not really.”

“Did Olivia like flowers? Pansies, for an example? Did she plant pansies in the gardens at the Hall? Or out on the moors?”

“There’ve always been drifts of pansies in the borders at the Hall. I don’t have any idea who planted them first. But Nicholas was very fond of them, I do know that. As for pansies on the moors,” she shook her head, “I don’t recall ever finding pansies there. But then I never looked for them.”

“I’m having the moors searched again. For Richard’s body.”

Rachel sighed. “Do you think you’ll find it? After all these years?”

“Who knows? I have to look.”

“Constable Dawlish must have been very happy about that!”

Rutledge shrugged. “I didn’t make an inquiry into his feelings on the subject. I just asked him to set up a search.”

She regarded him for a moment, then said, “You’re used to having your way, aren’t you?”

Surprised, he said, “No. I seldom have my way. But when something has to be done, and the local man can do it better than I can, I expect him to get on with it. He knows who can be spared for the job-”

“While you,” she said irritably, “sit in a warm and dry inn!”

“Hardly that. I saw you walking towards the Hall earlier. Why?”

Trask brought a tray with their orders, cutlets for him, a breast of chicken for her, and began to arrange the plates on the table, saving her from having to answer.